If you’ve done any advertising or marketing for your business ever, at all, I can virtually guarantee that you’ve been making at least 1 of the following 2 common marketing mistakes. And, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing business for 5, 10, 20, 30 years or more, and have been getting what most people would consider pretty good results—I’m here to tell you that these 2 mistakes have cost you a lot of money in lost opportunity and lost business.

And I’m not just blowing a bunch of smoke here to catch your attention. In fact, I want you to get some of your marketing material right now—be it a brochure, a radio script, a TV ad, a newspaper or magazine ad, your website, whatever it is—get access to it right now and then evaluate it for yourself as I describe these 2 mistakes. I want you to objectively judge your own marketing and advertising and make a determination for yourself whether or not what I’m saying has value.

So what are the 3 forbidden phrases? Well, they are phrases that use platitudes. In marketing, platitudes are essentially the kiss of death. So let me give you the definition of a platitude as it pertains to marketing. Platitudes are “words or phrases that are dull, obvious, or predictable that lack power to create interest because they are overused an unoriginal, that are nevertheless still commonly used as though they were unique or distinctive.”

Let me give you some examples of platitudes. They are words and phrases like, “Highest Quality, Best Service, Largest Selection, Gets the job done right the first time, 30 years of experience, been in business since 1776 B.C., Honest, Hard Working, You’ve tried the rest now try the best, Number one, Your dealer of choice, State-of-the-art, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Sound familiar? Of course it does. You’ve heard this kind of junk for years. But now here’s the killer question, do you have these terms in your marketing? I bet you do. I don’t even know you, but if I were a betting man (which I’m not), I’d bet the farm on the fact that your advertising and marketing is loaded with platitudes just like these right now. Take a look for yourself.

Now I don’t have time to take walk you through all 3 forbidden phrases, but we’ve created another video for you, that you can watch by clicking this link: 3 Forbidden Phrases. In that video I’ll take you through 3 platitude evaluations so you can objectively determine which words and phrases in your marketing and advertising are actual platitudes.

But here’s the bottom line, these platitudes that fill up your marketing and advertising are killing your profits and destroying your market opportunities. You see, these platitudes don’t distinguish or separate you in the marketplace. They don’t quantify or specify anything. They’re not believable, they usually not provable, and they cause your prospects to minimize, discount, disbelieve—or worst of all, ignore you altogether. Ultimately, your target market ends up believing that you and your business are just like everybody else in your industry. This is why your target market always ends up grinding you on price, regardless of how great you claim your “service” is or how much better you think you are than your competitors. None of that matters, because you have introduced yourself to the marketplace as one more scoop of vanilla in a whole sea of vanilla. Now I’m not saying there is anything wrong with vanilla, in fact I love vanilla, but what I am saying is that if you are perceived as being vanilla—just like everyone else, the only real message you are portraying to your target market is “me too.” Think about how pitiful that is. You see, this is why you are not dominating your market and this is why your sales and revenues are dependent upon the force of the market and not your ability to win over more and more customers and dominate your sector. That’s a big difference.

This is absolutely the wrong approach to marketing, yet it is the most common approach in business today. Everybody is doing it, including you and your competitors. The good news (or bad news if you’re slow), is that the first one to fix this problem basically wins. Seriously.

Let me explain fragmented marketing, which is the wrong way to do it, in contrast to what we call “systematized marketing” which is the right way to do it. Fragmented marketing means that there is no cohesive message or comprehensive system handling your marketing for you. Instead, when you buy marketing and advertising, it is developed by the company creating the ad, right? Think back to the last advertisement or marketing piece that you created for your company. What was it—a brochure, a website, a printed ad, a radio spot? So now let me ask you a question—who created the final product for you? They did, didn’t they? The radio station created your radio spot, the magazine created your magazine ad, the design company created your brochure, the web design company created the website, and the video production company developed the content for your video, right?

Think about how fragmented that makes your marketing efforts. All of those different companies have different ideas about what your marketing message should be based on their limited experience. Inevitably, they all use platitudes and then try to throw in their own dose of creativity. Think about how wrong this is. You need to develop and own your own message, you shouldn’t leave it to others, and you certainly shouldn’t leave it to multiple teams of others who don’t really have your best interest in mind, nor do they care about your position in the marketplace.

This is why you need a marketing system in place. The system dictates the content of the advertisements and it dictates the sequence that your prospects go through and the message that your prospects hear as they are ultimately led to your door. A systematized marketing program would actually facilitate the decision making process—in other words it would define what criteria your prospect should look for in a company, product, or service, and in doing so, it would lead them to buy from you and not your competitor.

Here’s another question to illustrate this problem—take a look at your last advertisement (I know its filled with platitudes), but here’s the question—how much money did you pay to have the content of that advertisement strategically created and formulated to ensure maximum results? I’m not talking about the design, I’m talking about the content—the message—what you actually said in the advertisement—not what it looks like. That’s what I thought—you paid nothing, right? 99.9% of the time, you only paid to have the advertisement produced or designed, or you paid for the spots or “airtime.” The content was usually just thrown together by the designer, the production team, or the salesperson! Think about it—the most important part of your marketing material—that is, the content and message—was put together for free by people who usually have no idea how to create good messaging anyway. And have you ever heard the saying, “you get what you pay for?” Well, I hate to tell you this, but if you’ve never paid anybody to create the actual message or content for your advertising campaigns, then you got what you paid for.

So here’s the point—when you think of marketing, you need to start thinking about your message. You need to think about what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it. When you think of marketing—don’t think of mediums anymore—think of messaging. Only once you have the right message should you start considering which mediums to run your marketing in.

You see, this is the difference between a marketing system and typical fragmented marketing. A marketing system considers first the message. Then it develops the message and installs the message in a comprehensive marketing system which facilitates the prospects decision making process. Finally, it chooses the best mediums to put those messages in to generate leads to pump into the system. Do you see how much more effective that is than typical fragmented marketing?

So now that you know the two most common marketing problems that businesses make, I’d like to invite you to learn how to solve these problems. At Digital Market Designs, we have put together a scientific marketing system, called the Power Marketing Program that effectively solves these problems and puts our customers on the path towards market dominance. The system is described in detail on our audio program entitled, Total Dominance. This audio program is available exclusively from Digital Market Designs, a marketing firm in the Power Marketing Consultants network.

Additionally, you can contact our office today to request a FREE Marketing Leverage Analysis. This marketing leverage analysis is not just another lame sales call. On the contrary, we will take a look at your existing marketing material, and we will objectively rate them using our own Marketing Content Scorecard. We will then review the results with you so you can see how much leverage there is available to you when you eliminate these common marketing problems and implement a marketing system based on the Power Marketing Program that is free from platitudes. Thanks for watching and best wishes to you.